* #2113 suspend time come up right after you change the time: Jeremy will look into this.

+

+

+

Other then that: Erin will keep looking into qtopia. Julian needs to study more about the python loader.

+

+

==Weekly update 17~22, Nov==

+

Not much to say this week. Most of the work we did could be seen

+

by querying docs.openmoko.org with keyword 'Om2008.11' and the commit

+

logs.

+

+

Overall,

+

Olv pushed his boot time enhancements (#69), so it will be in testing repo.

+

+

Tick enhanced etk scroll list (#2031) and is working on a volume issue (#1489). Jeremy fixed another suspend ticket (#2113).

+

+

Erin worked on a qtopia camping problem. She will take a look at bluetooth status starting from next week. Julian helped out our designer, Will, to work on the edge files. Upgrade path is getting better but there are still some issues (#2127).

+

+

We are having an internal debate regarding the release now, so there is not much I can say about this at the moment.

+

+

+

==Weekly update 11/23 ~ 11/29, Nov==

+

+

John Lee posted the following in the community mailing list

+

+

Dear Community,

+

+

As Sushama (our new testing team member) indicated in

+

http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/devel/2008-November/003493.html ,

+

we won't have a release in Nov. Currently the testing team is going

+

to do a full test on the latest testing image. It has all the goodies

+

we did and a lot of improvements over Om2008.9, so please try it and

+

report any error you find.

+

+

+

Upgrade howto:

+

+

>From Om2008.9 it's recommanded to upgrade with the following steps:

+

<pre>

+

sed -i -e 's%Om2008.8%testing%' /etc/opkg/*.conf

+

/etc/init.d/xserver-nodm stop

+

screen -DR

+

opkg update

+

opkg -force-overwrite upgrade

+

# (please ans Y to all questions)

+

# (the sshd (dropbear) will restart, so you need to reconnect and do

+

# 'screen -DR' again)

+

opkg upgrade

+

shutdown -r now

+

</pre>

+

To get the fastest boot time you also need to remove the following

+

packages:

+

<pre>

+

opkg remove task-base-nfs task-base-smbfs task-base-bluetooth \

+

task-base-usbgadget avahi-daemon avahi-autoipd blueprobe \

+

usb-gadget-mode portmap exquisite exquisite-theme-freerunner \

+

exquisite-themes

+

</pre>

+

+

Known issues:

+

+

* GTK redraw problem

+

* some obsolete kernel modules still left in system

+

* must remove 'ro' in kernel boot parameter if you use sd boot.

+

* will purge your incompatible e config, so you might need to set stuffs like suspend time again.

(send/receive files via bluetooth in NEO), Erin keeps working on bluetooth. Jeremy fixed some qtopia and location bugs, and will continue learning more about kernel. The GTK redraw problem is fixed now (#1946) so Julian will be back to help with the Paroli edje files and keeps working on python. Olv is having kernel fun now, but since it's gta03 related, you probably won't see him a lot on the public kernel list.

+

+

Tick

+

mostly worked on opkg this week. Basically there are two big issues:

+

+

* Incorrect behavior: as Tick indicated on devel list, there are still some logical error in opkg, which caused some problems during upgrade. That's why I have to use the -force-overwrite option in my previous upgrade howto.

+

+

* Efficiency: opkg is obviously not very efficient, both in memory and in speed.

* The infamous WSOD (#1841) seems to be solved. It's already in testing repo. Praise for all helped in this!

+

+

* GTK redraw problem (#1946) solved along with similar problem in qt with an illume patch. Thanks, Raster!

+

+

+

p.s. It seems my last update might have created an impression that the only way to try the testing repo is to upgrade from Om2008.9.

+

It's not true. Another way is to flash directly from http://downloads.openmoko.org/distro/experimental/daily/ if you don't mind reflashing the phone.

+

+

another p.s. Someone in OM kindly reminds me that my post can create inappropriate impressions, because although the logic is correct, the words and tongues might be misleading. My native language is Chinese (and I'm a master of words and tongues in Chinese), so it's kind of difficult for me to enhance this. All I can do is encourage you to go ahead and ask if anything is unclear, and keep in mind I'm a Taiwanese engineer when you read this. ;)

+

+

+

Regards,

+

John

+

+

== optimization team case closed ==

+

Let me explain Openmoko's software strategy for the next 6 months:

+

+

---1 current stable image

+

Our current stable image is called 'Om2008.9', available at http://downloads.openmoko.org/releases/Om2008.9/

+

We are sometimes cherry-picking fixes into it, but admittedly not as

+

many as we would like. If someone wants to step up to become stable

+

maintainer for this image and cherry-pick more fixes into it, please

+

let me know.

+

Alternatively, a number of other images are available, Debian, Qt

+

Extended, Android, FDOM, SHR, etc.

+

See http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Distributions for a more

+

comprehensive list.

+

+

---2 Mickey's framework milestones

+

As many people know, the next big thing for Openmoko will be Mickey's

+

FSO framework around d-bus and Python, and the Paroli telephony UI.

+

See http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/OpenmokoFramework

+

A few weeks ago, Mickey released milestone 4, available at http://downloads.freesmartphone.org/fso-stable/milestone4.1/

+

In late January, he plans to come out with milestone 5, in late March

+

with milestone 6.

+

See here for a more detailed roadmap: http://trac.freesmartphone.org/roadmap

+

+

---3 next major release, Om2009

+

After the next 2 FSO milestones, Openmoko will fork off a stable

+

branch, and spend 2-3 months on testing and bug fixing. This will lead

+

to our next major release, Om2009.

+

The telephony UI will be Paroli, see http://code.google.com/p/paroli/

+

The way things are going right now, we will probably have this release

+

mid-next year.

+

+

That's about it. Lots of good stuff happening in that direction, most

+

importantly I would mention the progress with our .28 kernel, improved

Olv and Erin is working on reducing boot time. Currently it's reduced
from 2:35 (Om2008.9) to around 1:40. One minute less in one week, and
Olv just got back from hospital last Monday. We will merge this into
OE once we get it organized properly.

Jeremy is working together with kernel guy (aka Matt Hsu) to look into
the possible improvement, namely take a screenshot and show it first
during resume. It's a common technique in mobile phone.

Julian is working on the python loader. He is new to python but he
got very good helps here in the office such as Guillaume, etc. He
still got some distro work to finish so it's going to take a while
before he can work full time on this.

Currently we have a major blocker #2071. It can be solved by update
EFL, but no icons will show up in illume. This seems to be a
different bug, but we are having an evas-native related issue on the
build server so the EFL packages are not updated correctly in
downloads.openmoko.org. This prevents people from confirming it and
fire another bug.

EFL ABI changed along with the svn rev increment last week, so
Installer and Locations won't work without rebuilding. Although
people already got reassigned, but nobody will give Om2008 love except
us and holger, so we will fix the issues above and update testing repo
soon.

After seeing these cute icons, we found out only qtopia and sudoku
work as usual. Other applications such as installer, locations are
fully dead (#2098, #2099), while settings is half dead (#2097).
Tick fixed 2098 and 2099 in openmoko.git commit
6725b90d5c9d844da196485beca7d9e82f8ce68c

This efl update from oe.dev upstream really scared us, so the current
plan is to stop following efl svn until another efl snapshot/release.

The alsa state file is a real trouble. Since the audio quality
actually differs on different versions of FR, it's hard to create one
state file that suits all. We will keep working on it.

Olv tried to replace u-boot by qi along with various improvements to
bring down the boot time to illume (without qtopia) to about 30 secs.
qi does not support dfu-util so only do this if you know what you're
doing. He dived into a lot of code reading to see if there are
further possibilities.

Jeremy looked into the two issues about suspend/resume that we may fix
in userspace. One is #1991, here is his update:

As I inspected, qpe and apmd opens /dev/apm_bios right now, and I
found two possible scenarios for this issue as below:

1) in qpe, we need to wait for the reply of prepare_suspend for the
modem. in this case, we may need to wait for a period +of time that
exceed 30 seconds, and we don't know how long it could be, waitfing
for the response from modem.

2) It goes to blank, but then ompower doesn't get any request for
doing suspend. I doubt in some case, illume doesn't set +the
suspend_delay timer.

for 1), I will go to check what does that mean by the AT commands we
emit before executing "apm --suspend".

for 2), I will debug illume for a while.

Another one #1347 is about after the resume, it goes to suspend
immediately. For this one, it's because screensaver timeouts right
after the resume. We can fix this by invoking "xset s off" before
going +to sleep, and reset it after the resume. Though I am looking
into the possbilities of enabling apm in xglamo and checking the
apm_bios driver code to see if we can fix this in xglamo.

BTW, Matt has patches to solve ticket #1884. It works. Matt is
arranging them and he is going to update some information about it.

Julian wrote an initial version of python loader. It imports various
modules first, listens on dbus and forks on demand to execfile. This
brought down the load time of pyefl-sudoko from 2.59s to 1.38, a 46%
improvement, and om-settings from 3.99 to 1.60, 59% improvement.
There was already a daemon in Om2008 just for the sake of loading
om-settings (and it cleverly sleeps for 4 seconds before starting up,
make the booting even slower), we take it out to get the 3.99 number.

It is just a start, there are many issues left regarding the python
loader and we will keep working on it. Once the code is in a better
shape Julian will put it into our svn/git.

We're heading toward the next release of Om2008 now. The current bug list could be obtained by custom query keyword 'Om2008.11' on docs.openmoko.org. Our team will work on some of the tickets, smooth
out minor issues so the testing team could have time to test and
hopefully release before the end of this month.

To be more specific, we are working on the following tickets:

#69 speed up system initialization: Olv will merge his improvement into testing repo next week.

#1489 sometimes volume is too low during a call: Tick will implement a volume control in qtopia dialer.

Not much to say this week. Most of the work we did could be seen
by querying docs.openmoko.org with keyword 'Om2008.11' and the commit
logs.

Overall,
Olv pushed his boot time enhancements (#69), so it will be in testing repo.

Tick enhanced etk scroll list (#2031) and is working on a volume issue (#1489). Jeremy fixed another suspend ticket (#2113).

Erin worked on a qtopia camping problem. She will take a look at bluetooth status starting from next week. Julian helped out our designer, Will, to work on the edge files. Upgrade path is getting better but there are still some issues (#2127).

We are having an internal debate regarding the release now, so there is not much I can say about this at the moment.

As Sushama (our new testing team member) indicated in
http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/devel/2008-November/003493.html ,
we won't have a release in Nov. Currently the testing team is going
to do a full test on the latest testing image. It has all the goodies
we did and a lot of improvements over Om2008.9, so please try it and
report any error you find.

will purge your incompatible e config, so you might need to set stuffs like suspend time again.

Echo:

Since there are different hw versions out there (a5, a6, a7), it's
impossible to provide one alsa state file that suits all models.
However, it seems you can always find appropriate values for your
neo. My way is to adjust
control.4 Speaker Playback Volume in
/usr/share/openmoko/scenarios/gsmhandset.state

the max value is 127, 95 works best on my a5. With volume level 3 or
4 in qtopia dialer, the other side can hear no echo while I get good
audio quality.

Team update:

Tick helped to put his touchscreen improvement into stable-tracking,
he will work on opkg internals next. Olv moved to look into kernel
and fso. Erin will try bluetooth. Julian is working on the GTK
redraw issue, please help him out. Jeremy will fix some qtopia bugs
and keep working on suspend/resume issues.

As in
http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-December/036792.html
(send/receive files via bluetooth in NEO), Erin keeps working on bluetooth. Jeremy fixed some qtopia and location bugs, and will continue learning more about kernel. The GTK redraw problem is fixed now (#1946) so Julian will be back to help with the Paroli edje files and keeps working on python. Olv is having kernel fun now, but since it's gta03 related, you probably won't see him a lot on the public kernel list.

Tick
mostly worked on opkg this week. Basically there are two big issues:

Incorrect behavior: as Tick indicated on devel list, there are still some logical error in opkg, which caused some problems during upgrade. That's why I have to use the -force-overwrite option in my previous upgrade howto.

Efficiency: opkg is obviously not very efficient, both in memory and in speed.

Maybe we could expect another opkg release soon.

Qtopia:

OM is moving more focus to gta03 now, so my current resource for
qtopia is fairly limited. Currently the things I want to fix most
are:

The infamous WSOD (#1841) seems to be solved. It's already in testing repo. Praise for all helped in this!

GTK redraw problem (#1946) solved along with similar problem in qt with an illume patch. Thanks, Raster!

p.s. It seems my last update might have created an impression that the only way to try the testing repo is to upgrade from Om2008.9.
It's not true. Another way is to flash directly from http://downloads.openmoko.org/distro/experimental/daily/ if you don't mind reflashing the phone.

another p.s. Someone in OM kindly reminds me that my post can create inappropriate impressions, because although the logic is correct, the words and tongues might be misleading. My native language is Chinese (and I'm a master of words and tongues in Chinese), so it's kind of difficult for me to enhance this. All I can do is encourage you to go ahead and ask if anything is unclear, and keep in mind I'm a Taiwanese engineer when you read this. ;)

---1 current stable image
Our current stable image is called 'Om2008.9', available at http://downloads.openmoko.org/releases/Om2008.9/
We are sometimes cherry-picking fixes into it, but admittedly not as
many as we would like. If someone wants to step up to become stable
maintainer for this image and cherry-pick more fixes into it, please
let me know.
Alternatively, a number of other images are available, Debian, Qt
Extended, Android, FDOM, SHR, etc.
See http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Distributions for a more
comprehensive list.

---3 next major release, Om2009
After the next 2 FSO milestones, Openmoko will fork off a stable
branch, and spend 2-3 months on testing and bug fixing. This will lead
to our next major release, Om2009.
The telephony UI will be Paroli, see http://code.google.com/p/paroli/
The way things are going right now, we will probably have this release
mid-next year.

That's about it. Lots of good stuff happening in that direction, most
importantly I would mention the progress with our .28 kernel, improved
wifi driver, some attempts at getting more out of the glamo chip,
improved boot time, etc.
Yes, the Optimization team is gone, as part of a bigger company
reorganization. Some people were laid off. Some new ones are being
hired.
John did a great job, and I hope he stays around to continue his
excellent work, for example to bring the optimization improvements up
into dev.openembedded.org so that more people can see the progress.